Warhammer Vampire Counts : “counts as” Hex Wraiths

Neil of Orange here with a bit of Warhammer gothic horror hobby on this cold and dark night (well here in the UK anyway…)

I’ve been slowly adding new units to my ever growing Vampire Counts army in the wake of the book released for Warhammer 8th edition. While I’m not much of a fan of the current rules system I do like painting undead and there’s always other systems to look at (Kings of War is next on my try list).

Some time ago I picked up the GW Morgul Knights (these are metal by the way) thinking that I liked the horses and maybe with some work I could make them into Blood Knights. After a lot of time had passed I came upon this box of figures and looked at them again. Firstly I wasn’t sure I’d ever use Blood Knights, and if I did I would want really amazing figures so these wouldn’t really cut it. I did however get to thinking about using them as either Black Knights or Hex Wraiths. I already have 8 Black Knights completed and lots of spare models I haven’t made up – all old metal figures. I also quite like the new GW plastics and Mantic’s aren’t bad either, so there was no real need to look at that. The Hex Wraiths however from GW don’t really do it for me, so perfect, I had a theme.

To paint these up, I used the same trick I used on my spirit swarms (which co-indecently are also Lord of the Rings figures) which worked reasonably well. I had to do it twice as I didn’t get enough of the lighter grey/white onto the figures and after shading they were quite dark. I was tempted to leave them like this, but it was too subtle at any distance.

They are all mounted on some theme resin bases. You can find a link to someone selling the bases here I can’t seem to find the original supplier I got them from. Quite a different style to the rest of my recent undead, but the colour palette matches so it should work nicely.

The real issue with these guys is ranking them up. They are designed to work as Lord of the Rings battle game figures on 40mm round bases, not ranked at 25mm. Even with the varied heights from the bases there’s only 1 or 2 formations where they play nice.

These metal figures are no longer available, but GW do still stock a plastic version that I think might actually be nicer than these (for shame!). They come with command (which Hex Wraiths can’t make much use of, but it would make the unit look nice which frankly is a good enough reason) and I am thinking that 6 strong isn’t a bad number – I plan to add this chappy to the unit at some point.